Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pdonis 1655 days ago
> how do you all cope with this?

The same way I cope with change in general: by adapting. Which is the approach I think we should be taking in general as a society towards climate change.

> I'm addicted to my comfortable, wealthy lifestyle as a software engineer and I'm ashamed of it.

You shouldn't be. Most people in the world demonstrate by the choices they make that they prefer a more wealthy lifestyle to a less wealthy one. There are people who don't, but even most of them depend for some essential functions on technology that is only possible in a wealthy society. (Anyone who really doesn't depend on technology for anything won't be posting here or reading posts here anyway.)

Human activities can certainly affect the environment, and not just the climate. IMO the hysteria over climate change has had the unfortunate effect of putting many other more pressing environmental issues on the back burner. We should be good stewards of the environment, but that requires being as objective as we can about how much priority issues actually deserve, and also requires recognizing that the best way to fix environmental issues in general is to create more wealth. The wealthier the world is, the cheaper fixing up the environment becomes in comparison.

1 comments

What's an example of a more pressing environmental issue than climate change?
Ocean acidification and the potential collapse of the planktonic base of the food web. By a long shot, IMO.
Caused by... Anthropological climate change due to CO2 dissolution into oceans' waters, so it's a subset of the larger issue, fix pumping CO2 into the atmosphere then tackling ocean acidification becomes more easily approachable.
Sure. My point is only that temperature changes in and of themselves, as bad as they are, aren't the most incipient danger.
That was the kind of Socratic point of my question.. I agree 100%
why do you think ocean acidification happens
Mass extinctions due to things like insecticides.
This. I’ve even considered buying a large swath of land and letting it go fully natural.
I found a permaculture community and found a guy who loves to tend to the land but has no money, so I gave him a downpayment to buy an 8 acre piece of land about 2 hours away from me.

> letting it go fully natural

The piece of land we bought was fully natural for a long time and it wasn't pleasant when I first visited. It was extremely thick and hard to even walk about, so the first step we had to do is clear it out to make a living space.

Here's his blog about his updates on the land: https://libresults.com/c/walkabout-update-7-lots-of-rain-and...

You could start a land trust of some kind. Massachusetts has a huge one called the Trustees and many of the best hiking trails and beaches are actually Trustees land. It’s private, but generally open to the public. Tax-free for them, which would be better than you paying property taxes on unused land.
this is a great idea
Chemicals in our food and water supplies.